I’ve been working in finance for the past 9 years as the head of investments for a small wealth management firm and am considering pivoting into tech. I’ve done a little coding on my own but I’m ramping that up with a lot more self study and Hack Reactor part time. I’m hoping that one area where I’d have an edge is if I apply to SWE jobs in FinTech since it’s blowing up here in NYC and figure my finance background can give me an edge over other candidates. Thoughts?
Your finance background unfortunately won’t help. Most companies deal in blockchain currency and machine learning, so a traditional finance background is actually at a disadvantage
What matters most is your coding skills. Finance background is a bonus usually.
Finance background more useful for analytics than swe. Still go forward with swe anyway though.
If you’re going for an SWE role your finance background is not really relevant. If you were going into some other role in Fintech it might be transferable. It might be a bit more relevant for a product manager but it sounds like both those roles would be a stretch given your current technical background. If you want into tech, you’re better off getting into a different department more aligned with your background and then applying for an internal transfer.
Thanks for the help! Yeah what I’m reading on this thread pretty much everyone agrees with you. My firm is small and my role is research focused with a great deal of autonomy, so I figure the better option is to use what I’m learning in coding to practice and create projects that could be attractive to future SWE employers.
You’re not going to learn coding best practices by working on your own at an investment firm. The quicker you get out of your current situation, the closer you’ll be to becoming a software engineer.
Unemployed Sales Traders are a dime a dozen. The business part of fun tech ain’t all that hard. Some firms might see your finance background as a plus, but the coding aspect is definitely what they’ll be looking for.
We have some finance people without coding experience... doesn’t seem like we hire that many tho or have that many compared to SWEs.
do you Python, do you ML, do you git?
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I feel like the key point is your coding level needs to meet the future company’s need. Finance background is a plus but the key point is the coding capability